


...Terminal Ends...

by josephina_x



Series: Night and Flame: The Song Electric [4]
Category: Smallville, Smallville Season 11 (Comics)
Genre: (so much talking), (this is not about the pairings), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Christmas-time, Fix-It, Gen, Talking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-04
Updated: 2013-04-04
Packaged: 2017-12-07 10:17:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/747375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/josephina_x/pseuds/josephina_x
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(tagline blatantly stolen from Nicnac:) "One's a superhero at half power and on probation from saving the world. The other's a supervillain that's turned over a new leaf since regaining his lost memories. They fight crime!"</p><p>Or: the one in which Lex's 'no lose' situation with the League turns into a 'damnit, how can I make this go on indefinitely?' problem of massive, headache-making, panic-attack-inducing proportions. Because Clark is a sneaky bastard, and one of his alien superpowers is most definitely the big-puppy-dog-eyes. (They must involve some sort of mind-control-hypnosis-thing, because Lex hasn't been able to say 'no' to them, yet. Even with sunglasses on. This is also a problem.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	...Terminal Ends...

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jlvsclrk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jlvsclrk/gifts).



> Title: ...Terminal Ends...  
> Author: [josephina_x](http://josephina-x.livejournal.com)  
> Fandom: Smallville, Smallville Season 11  
> Pairing: Clark, Lex  
> Rating: R (for language)  
> Spoilers: through Smallville (before the seven-year-jump), and through Season 11's "Guardian" arc (though a mild spoiler or two through the end of the "Detective" arc), but diverges sometime after that  
> Word count: 16,600+  
> Summary: (tagline blatantly stolen from Nicnac:) "One's a superhero at half power and on probation from saving the world. The other's a supervillain that's turned over a new leaf since regaining his lost memories. They fight crime!"
> 
> Or: the one in which Lex's 'no lose' situation with the League turns into a 'damnit, how can I make this go on indefinitely?' problem of massive, headache-making, panic-attack-inducing proportions. Because Clark is a sneaky bastard, and one of his alien superpowers is most definitely the big-puppy-dog-eyes. (They must involve some sort of mind-control-hypnosis-thing, because Lex hasn't been able to say 'no' to them, yet. Even with sunglasses on. This is also a problem.)  
> Warnings: Un-beta'd. Mind the POV-shifts! ;)  
> Disclaimer: Not mine, not-for-profit.  
> Comments: Yes, please! :)  
> Author's Note: A continuation of the original Clexmas Gift Exchange 2012 fic ["And Sparks Flew"](http://clexmas.livejournal.com/67665.html) for , follows ["Short Circuit"](http://clexmas.livejournal.com/69067.html) and ["Live Wires"](http://josephina-x.livejournal.com/38078.html). For [jlvsclrk](http://jlvsclrk.livejournal.com)'s birthday, "kinda-sorta" ('cause I had most of it written earlier, and was just trying to finish it off in time for ya :) -- anyway, I hope you like it! *crosses fingers*)

~*~*~*~*~*~

Clark had to admit, it was pretty funny to hear everybody talk about things after the fact.

He carefully stifled a grin and turned his newspaper to the next page, as he listened in on what Chloe and Lois were chattering about two chairs down from him, in the central lounge area of the Metropolis Watchtower.

"They can't name **themselves!** " Lois said like it was some big scandal of Pulitzer-winning proportions. "And 'Nightwing' is already taken!"

See, now, Clark never really understood that one. It wasn't like anybody was ever gonna mistake a definitely-male Nightwing in Metropolis with Batman's female partner in crime-fighting in Gotham. And how could there be some unwritten 'rule' that somebody couldn't use the same crimefighting name twice, anyway? Regular people had the same names all the time!

If Clark had gotten the chance, he _totally_ would've gone with 'Nightwing' over 'The Blur' or 'Superman' or, oh yeah, 'The Red And Blue Blur' (thanks, Lois). He'd even come up with the name before he'd ever heard of anybody doing Hero work in Gotham.

Well, ths time Lois hadn't gotten to name him. They'd introduced themselves to the police as Nightwing and--

"What the heck kind of name is 'Flamebird'?"

\--and that had been that.

"I bet it's Tess," Chloe said suddenly.

...Okay, now that was just hi- _lar_ ious. Lex was going to get a kick out of that one!

Then again... maybe that was why Lex had dressed up with the red wig-hair ponytail stuff coming out of his helmet, along with the female-like bodysuit? At the time, Clark had thought that it had been more of a Victor-Victoria thing, since the emergence of two new crimefighters in Metropolis with similar skill-sets right after Lex and Clark had ended up with half-and-half Kryptonian powers seemed pretty darn obvious to _him_. He'd also figured that the red-ponytail-thing was part of the disguise, and maybe a small, unobtrusive dig at Bart or something, since he'd heard about tht 'I want a ponytail' comment from Bart himself post-kidnapping-to-a-holding-tank-cell by Lex all those years ago. The 'dig' would probably only be obvious following an explanation after the fact -- Bart wasn't exactly the smartest crayon in the box -- but he was pretty much the only one who they'd have to worry about tackling them with Kryptonite, if it got to that point.

Not that that would be easy. The bodysuits they'd used last night had been stripped-down to just the kevlar and steel-plates with an internal lining of lead. The suits had originally included power-servos to help the limbs move -- the outer skin was pretty heavy. They'd also had an experimental life support system to cycle cooling water and breathable air, since their original purpose was supposed to be... well, Lex had _said_ that they had come out of a stalled in-development exoskeleton project that had been meant for human-use, for moving large chunks of Kryptonite about safely.

Clark had wondered about that. The movement servos _had_ looked stronger than they'd needed to be for just moving the suit, way stronger, but they were trying to get along so he hadn't needled Lex on it. Yes, the suits could have been made for exactly what Lex had said they were for, but they could have also just as easily been for something less benign, like taking on the various Metropolis-based Heroes... except that the suits had had no separate power-packs to allow for unrestricted, untethered motion. They would have needed to be hooked up with large cables for power, water, air, and the like to some other non-portable unit to work properly, which would have been way too cumbersome, unwieldy, and unworkable in a real fight. So Clark had taken Lex at face-value, even though there might have been a separate project for fixing just that...

It had also been why they'd stripped out the external cables and most of the internal circuits.

They'd still gone out patrolling wearing a pair of small battery-driven powerpacks on their backs, one each, but all those really did was lit up the LED-arrays lining the 'seams' of the suits. Lex _said_ that wearing them was a good idea because it would do double-duty -- it would cover up the suit-cable disconnects and it would lead villainous-types to believe that the suits were (in fact) power suits, and further (and more incorrectly for identification purposes) that the two of them would have no abilities without them. (When Clark had asked him what he thought the street-level criminals would think, Lex had just given him a _Look_ \-- he had never really thought much of the 'intelligence' level of the common-criminal and, honestly, Clark couldn't blame him.) Clark _told_ Lex that he thought that Lex was being pretty sneaky-smart about that, since that would have the criminals distracted and aiming for their backs, and not trying to figure out how to (correctly) depower them through Kryptonite or the various ways to get the rock past the radiation-shielding armored-gear they were sporting.

What Clark _didn't_ tell Lex was that he was _sure_ that _Lex_ thought that with the power packs on and online that they made the suits look like futuristic medieval armor crossed with the best sort of sci-fi spacesuit, and were just that much cooler with little lines of glowing light etched all down the sides, and that he just didn't want to admit it out loud.

Clark had been pretty much proven right, he felt, when Lex had casually mentioned that he had plans for better versions of the suits before they went out next. They'd spent a lot of time crouching on rooftops talking while they were waiting for things to happen, but bringing up suit upgrades in the middle of a 'stakeout' when nobody generally talked about that sort of thing out on patrol was not exactly _subtle_. (Even _Oliver_ saved the hey-I-got-a-cool-new-trick-arrow-idea! shop-talk for indoors.)

Clark sort of mentally kicked himself out of his thoughts as Lois and Chloe finally worked their way around to the more wild-speculation phase of their discussion. It would have made sense-enough if Lex had dressed up in the female-armor with the red-hair ponytail-wig thing just to have people in the League wondering if he was Tess, and a dig at his little-sis if she _was_ still alive and just in-hiding. ...Clark _was_ beginning to wonder about that, actually, because he made it a point to glance through Chloe's Watchtower activity logs every so often to keep on top of things, and awhile ago her workload had included something very odd involving hacking Lex's internal systems via a Bluetooth cellular-call. From there, it hadn't taken long before he'd found out about those weird messages from LexCorp that Lex had supposedly subconsciously sleep-typed to Oliver. Clark knew that Tess was pretty good at the computer-stuff, too, and if she wasn't dead but actually stuck in a LexCorp facility somewhere... well, the easiest way to get the League's attention these days was to make it look like something strange had come from Lex's computer. The messages had been complete garbage, though, and they'd stopped about as abruptly as they'd begun. It made Clark wonder what Lex had done to stop them, and if it had really been Tess after all...

But geez, Tess' actual current alive-or-dead status aside...

"C'mon, cuz -- it totally fits!" Lois pushed. "Tess was a Checkmate Knight, she has the training, and she's got red hair! She and Emil were getting really tight there at the end, and Emil's been doing all this robotic stuff at S.T.A.R. Labs! He's also kind of got that weird wild-side of his -- remember the Elvis impersonator thing? I bet you _three_ doughnuts that this powersuit thing was Tess' idea, and she talked him into it."

"Creme-filled, or chocolate?" Chloe asked with a raised eyebrow.

"Hey, woah -- let's not get crazy here," Lois said, backing off.

Clark stifled a purely mental grin and wondered how long it'd be before anyone actually _asked_ Emil about it outright, instead of maybe possibly thinking about tossing out snarky allusions in his presence the next time they somehow ran across him.

"Hey, what do you think, Clark?" Chloe asked him.

"Hm?" Clark said, looking up from his newspaper. "About what?"

Lois sighed in exasperation. "Geez, Smallville, you really lose that much super-hearing?"

Clark shrugged.

"About Tess and Emil being the new Hero-duo prowling Metropolis?" she asked him with a 'c'mon, back me up here' look.

"I don't know," Clark said in a flat-out lie, without feeling any more sorry about it than he had the first time Lois had asked him if he was the Blur. Or the second. Or the... "If it's really Tess, why wouldn't she have reported in to Watchtower?"

Lois snorted, and Chloe got a pinched look, and that set off a whole new round of speculation right there.

Clark had to stifle another smile, because he knew them all too well. Question the Sullivan-Lane's assumptions without any backup? Get them digging in their heels and hanging on to that thought like a bulldog with a bone. _They_ sure weren't going to be considering that Nightwing and Flamebird were anybody other than Emil and Tess for a good long time, and the two of them were pretty much the brains of the League. Batman might figure it out... if it peaked his interest. But Batman wasn't part of the League, so Chloe wouldn't think to tap him for help and Lois wouldn't ask because she'd want to find out herself. And Batman wasn't particularly inclined to play nice with Oliver, so he'd have no reason to get involved, even if Oliver asked him for help (which he wouldn't), and no reason to tell if he did (and Batman was pretty closed-mouthed about stuff he figured out like that anyway, to anyone who wasn't the party involved). That meant that it was probably pretty likely that _nobody_ with the League was going to twig on to the fact that it was Clark and Lex running around doing 'Tower unapproved' Heroics until well-after they'd both established themselves as the city's newest 'unknown vigilanties' quite nicely.

And that was just fine with him.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex was grumbling to himself a little as he finally made his way back down to the workshop he'd co-opted for their unofficial 'Hero lair'. (Yes, 'theirs'. His and Clark's. Apparently he had his own little 'fortress of solitude' now, and he figured it was a step up from either of Clark's other two, because _this_ one had _indoor plumbing_ and _heating_ and _locks_ on the doors, not to mention actual _doors_ to _be_ closed and locked, thank-you-very-much!) Work had been awful that day -- almost no-one had been in on Christmas Day to take care of things, including Otis, so Lex had found himself doing a lot more of the gruntwork than usual alongside a skeleton staff that had distinctly _not_ wanted to be there, despite the holiday pay that ought to be making it worth their while.

He hadn't exactly woken up in bed in a good mood that morning, either.

Primarily because he'd woken up in bed.

...His _old_ bed, that is. He'd changed rooms in the Penthouse somewhat accidentally -- when he'd been memoriless, he'd thought his current room had been his old room.

This would not have been so much a problem, had he not fallen asleep in his new bed the night before.

He'd panicked a bit, until he finally remembered getting up in the middle of the night in half-a-daze to get a glass of water, feeling like hell.

The not-quite-sleepwalking had been bad enough, but the dreams had been worse. He hadn't dreamt since losing his memories -- at least, none that he could remember. Last night he'd dreamed, and could remember it, but it had been hazy. Tess had also been in them, and he really didn't want to think about what that meant.

He also didn't want to go downstairs and check her readouts right away. He'd had a bad day so far, and he wanted a pick-me-up, first. He might be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, but -- damnit -- he had a right to enjoy his life just as much as anybody else did!

So instead of heading down to the depths of the building to depress himself mightily in looking over Tess' brainwave readouts, or calling up his own to compare them, which would probably be just as bad, he made an executive decision to pencil in a little willing denial into his schedule for an hour or two.

He keyed himself into the workshop, closed and locked the door behind him, and turned around to survey his all his new 'toys'. He took a good look around -- happy to note that no-one had disturbed the place, or otherwise been in since he'd left it -- then clapped his hands together and rubbed them gleefully, fully intending to get a good chunk of work done on modifying the suits that evening. Even with the majority of the electronic innards removed, the male suit had barely fit Clark; the female one had been a bit uncomfortably tight on Lex in certain areas, as well, and far too loose and chafing in others. It would be a bit of a challenge to make a suit that _looked_ female on the outside, but actually fit him well on the inside; he might have to learn more about female armor and padding than he'd ever really wanted to.

Then there were the problems general to both suits: the rough shielding could use some work -- it was piecemeal and thicker than it needed to be -- and the joints didn't need nearly as much reinforcement as they currently had -- in fact, most of the bracing material could be removed. Since he and Clark now had the super-strength and super-durability to be able to make up the difference, when it came to taking the brunt of what might otherwise be a series of fatally-crushing blows from external force or pressure, Lex figured they should be able to get away with jettisonning the additional armor-weight. A little extra flexibility would be welcome, though he'd like to come up with a cooling solution that could be added back in along with an independent air supply -- he didn't like the idea of breathing in unfiltered air. The last thing either he or Clark needed would be to accidentally inhale some form of weaponized Kryptonite powder mid-fight. All the lead-lined kevlar suit material in the _world_ wouldn't do either of them a bit of good against Kryptonite radiation if the stuff was already inside them, coating their lungs.

As for the bells and whistles, the power-indicator lights had been all right, but not really necessary; they didn't quite have that 'cool and competent' factor yet that would make their opponents cringe on-sight at the look of them. Right now they were a bit generic -- they needed a 'hook' and a signature theme. ...They also needed controls so that they could change the luminosity output. They were doing their 'work' at night, after all, and they might want to sneak up on people sometimes ...or blind them. And that didn't even begin to touch upon the _tools_ that Lex could bring to the table, that they could add into the suits to make their crimefighting lives _that_ much easier. Batman had a utility belt, after all, so why not them?

Frankly, they could do better. _He_ could do better.

Lex stepped forward, fingers itching for some good, solid, hands-on solo work.

He ended up passed out on a nearby couch not twenty minutes in, fast asleep.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex woke up for the second -- ...third? yes, third, they'd gotten back from Hero patrol late; he'd probably had his sleepy-meandering after midnight -- _third_ time that day in a not-so-great mood.

This time, however, was a little different, in that _this_ time someone was looming over him when he woke.

"GAH!" Lex yelped, swinging an arm out.

His arm was neatly caught, and Lex wrenched it away abruptly--

\--except that there was no _wrenching_ involved at all, because the intruder let go as soon as Lex tried to pull away.

 _Oh._ Clark. Right.

Lex frowned up at him.

_...Wait a minute._

"How did you get in here?!" Lex grumbled the demand at his partner in not-crime as he sat up. He better not have broken the door!

"I looked at the keypad, saw where the only fingerprints were, and tried a few combinations?" Clark said, looking down at him in slight amusement.

...Well, damn. He'd never thought about the possible downsides to the logistics of working in an unused, out of the way lab before. He'd not picked one of the more secure labs because they tended to be in more highly-trafficked areas and he hadn't wanted people wondering what he was up to.

Should he start telling his cleaning staff to clean the keypads less often as an extra security measure? But that would promote the spread of germs and bacteria a bit more than was preferable; worse, it was cold and flu season. Lex might be particularly immune to such -- a "gift" of the meteor shower, if a usual one -- but his employees weren't.

"...You okay?" Clark asked, and Lex glanced back up at him.

"I'm fine," Lex said, and promptly had his judgment questioned with a "you sure?" from Clark as the 'on-probation' Hero plopped down next to him on the couch.

Lex frowned at him.

"Is something wrong?" Clark said, and Lex mentally threw his hands up in the air.

"How many times are you going to ask the same question? Are you hoping for a different answer?" Lex said in exasperation.

Clark just blinked at him. "I wasn't--" Then he stopped and frowned, giving Lex a long look. "You're usually better at telling what I mean," he all-but-accused, even if his tone had been almost gentle.

"Clark, when was the last time we had a meaningful conversation?" Lex said, rubbing his hands over his face as he tried to wake himself up more fully without the assistance of a inconveniently-unavailable coffee product.

"Last night," Clark answered promptly.

Lex mentally kicked himself, because that was supposed to have been a rhetorical question. Telling Clark that none of their various short conversations last night had been any such thing would have just been the verbal equivalent of shooting himself in the foot.

"...Am I missing something?" Clark said suddenly and without preamble. "Because I thought last night was kind of okay, but if you're having second thoughts, that's okay, too. Hero work is kind of dangerous, even for me-- um, us."

"I don't have a problem with Hero work, Clark," Lex told him with a sigh. "I'm just--"

"--having a bad day, yeah, I got that, but you're kind of leaving out the _why_ ," Clark interupted, and when had he gotten so rude? "I can't help if you don't tell me what's going on."

Lex stared over at him, mystified.

Then his brain finally started to catch up with him. "You want to help me," Lex said flatly.

"Well, yeah," Clark said, blinking in confusion. "Heroes help each other out all the time. I help out Oliver sometimes, Batman helps me... You know?"

Lex was glad that he was past his hatred of all-things-Queen enough that he heard the part about Batman, except that then he remembered what Clark must have been referring to with that.

He also remembered what his initial reaction to Superman -- _Clark_ \-- being hurt, and then _shot_ , had been, during that whole fiasco with the ice-wielding criminal element and that so-called "Prankster."

Lex shivered and looked down at his hands, feeling ashamed.

He'd been scared after losing his memories -- he'd known that feeling had been connected with Superman, but not why or how.

\--He'd not been scared in the very beginning. He'd stared up at that one lone man hanging in the sky in awe when he'd pushed that planet back. The quaking fear had come later.

So of course he'd smiled when he'd seen Superman get hurt by Batman. He'd nearly grinned when he'd heard the news that Superman had been shot. After all, he was _supposed_ to feel relieved that the man who could bounce bullets off of his chest and move planets from their orbit and had shattered his window in angry spite was vulnerable. He'd had every reason to feel that way.

Except he hadn't felt relieved at all.

He'd grinned because he'd felt like laughing. He'd felt like laughing because Tess had been there, and Tess... well, it wouldn't have been a good thing to be caught out crying in front of her. Nor safe.

Laughing amusement would have been safer than shouting in panic. He'd barely been able to imagine what must have been going through her (his) head when he'd first caught on to Tess' own reaction; shifting his focus to her had been difficult, but still far easier than dealing with his own strange, unsourced feelings.

Realizing that she had felt concern for Superman too had been... god, he'd wanted to _rip apart her mind_ **right then**. He'd wanted to know what she knew _immediately_ , to try and understand what he was missing, because he'd _known_ he had to be missing something -- knowing 'Superman' was 'Clark Kent' hadn't been enough! He had wanted to know _everything_ she knew, because who was Clark Kent really? And how the hell had **she** known him? He _hadn't_ seemed the type for Tess to have struck up any sort of friendship with, not that Tess had ever _done_ friends or friendship with anyone, as far as he'd been able to tell, even at the time. And 'Clark Kent' had skipped town, leaving only 'Superman' behind. How else could he have tried to find out? He had _needed_ to know who Superman was. _All_ of his secrets. _**Every last detail. ******_

"I mean, I know you get weird about being helped sometimes, but I don't really mean it like that, and-- you're not even paying attention to me right now," Clark said, with a slight frown.

"I am listening," Lex protested.

Clark started to look frustrated, maybe angry -- up until he stopped and took a deep breath. "Okay," he said quietly, then a little louder: "Lex, I am a little worried about you right now. Okay? Not angry. _Worried._ "

...It suddenly occurred to Lex that Clark seemed to have a better idea of what was going on with him than he seemed to have of Clark.

It was not a comforting thought.

"Look, can we start over or something?" Clark asked. "I didn't mean to wake you up. I guess I wasn't thinking. Last night I didn't know that you were planning on working today. If I'd known you weren't gonna be able to sleep in..." he trailed off.

Lex felt a cold shiver go down his spine.

"Oh, geez," Clark sighed and leaned back into the couch. "I wasn't spying on you Lex, I swear." _He hadn't?_ "Lois was just keeping track of you today because of the whole half-powers thing, and I found out from her." Oh, goody -- because that just made it all better. "Do you want to maybe get some sleep?" Lex shook his head. "Okay. Well, do you want me to go?"

"No," Lex said immediately, and Clark relaxed.

"Okay," Clark said. "Is there anything you want me to do? ...Or that you want to do?"

Lex felt a grinding sort of frustration.

"Lex?"

"Don't push me!" Lex snapped, and then felt terrible immediately.

But Clark just sort of blinked and stared.

Lex felt the pressure of expectation start to weigh down on his shoulders.

"...Do you want to tell me what's going on?"

Lex ground his teeth.

"Okay..." Clark said quietly. "Just staying, no talking?"

"That would be helpful."

"Okay," said Clark. "I can do that."

Lex let out a surprised, breathy laugh, then felt the cracked grimace of a grin slide off of his face as he glanced back at Clark and realized he was serious.

Lex had to look away.

He leaned over his knees slightly, feeling shaky, almost lost. He swallowed hard.

Clark didn't say anything. He just sat there on his right, at his side, next to him, breathing.

Lex clenched his jaw, then let out a long breath and slid back against the couch. He was just so tired right then. Just... tired. of... everything.

He almost started when he slid to a stop against the cushions and his head hit Clark's arm, casually draped along the back of the couch behind him.

He un-self-consciously leaned into Clark, his eyelids drooping, and felt Clark curl his arm around his back and tug him in slightly, hand slipping down to his waist.

Lex let his own hand carelessly fall to Clark's thigh, and he let out another sigh as he realized exactly how comfortable this was. They'd never sat like this before, never so close. It didn't quite occur to him to wonder why...

Instead, he simply let his head settle in the crook of Clark's arm, and felt his whirring mind begin to settle.

God, he was a mess. Emotionally, he was all over the damn place, far worse than he'd been without his memories. ...And maybe that was part of the problem. It had barely been twenty-four hours since he'd gotten his memory back, and all he'd done was run himself ragged. He hadn't yet taken the time to try and settle his own mind and thoughts, let alone anything else, and he **hated** dealing with his emotions -- he always had -- he'd rather just suppress them, more often than not. But he'd just gone from watching Clark getting shot and nearly dying, to collapsing at the hospital from the stress of healing, to yet another assassination-attempt by Queen on his person, to haphazardly trying to fix things at the hospital for Clark, to the relevations about Tess' not-death, to getting confronted by Clark _without_ the League watching and waiting in the wings to strike, to crime-fighting _alongside_ Clark, to barely three hours of sleep, to trying to run LexCorp almost single-handedly for a day, to getting his sleep interrupted when he'd least expected someone to walk in on him...

...yes, and he was sitting there wondering why he was a mess at the moment? Lex softly sighed at his own antics and mentally shook his head at himself. He hadn't even given himself the proper breathing room to really think through what the League's eventual response was going to be to all of the aforementioned events and his accidental superpowering, let alone Clark's certain unwavering willingness to lie to the League to cover up Lex's state of recovered memory _and_ Clark's subsequent brisk -- if not downright amiable -- response on the subject of Lex's current hold over half of his powers. (And who the hell wanted to _share_ their superpowers, anyway? ... _Clark_ , apparently. It was enough to give Lex a headache, if he thought on it too hard.) Lex hadn't been so out of it last night that that willingness to lie on his behalf hadn't registered, though -- far from it. If anything, it had seemed like a grave warning klaxon that something was truly wrong with Clark's relations with the League, especially with it having been served up alongside a generous helping of brazen, flippant remarks about 'going to villainy'.

"Clark, why are you all right with me having half your powers?" Lex couldn't help but ask.

"Because you're not going to do anything stupid with them," Clark promptly informed him.

Lex blinked open his eyes and frowned uncertainly up at him.

"Define 'stupid'," he said, and Clark just laughed.

"I'm serious," Lex said, eyes narrowing, and at that Clark sighed.

"I... don't think _I'm_ stupid enough to answer that one," Clark said.

"Clark."

"...Well, do you promise not to get mad?"

"No," Lex said just as promptly.

He felt Clark stifle a laugh inside his chest, and Lex resettled himself and closed his eyes again. Amazingly, he could hear Clark's heartbeat from where he had his head up against Clark's shoulder -- that far away -- and he wasn't even really listening for it.

But as Clark calmed, he sighed again, and softly said, "All right."

There was a long pause, then:

"You were the one who said that we shouldn't be using our powers as Nightwing and Flamebird unless we absolutely had to," Clark reminded him. "And that's just so you."

Lex frowned a little to himself. "That's just common sense," he objected softly. "To keep the League guessing, and the worse villains from trying to make a name for themselves attacking us when we're not at... well, when _you're_ not at full strength," Lex told him. "You're not used to fighting without your full powers, and I'm not used to fighting _with_ powers. We'd need practice before being ready to do anything really dangerous..." _if we even wanted to push it that far_.

Of course, none of that even began to touch upon the fact that, for all Lex knew, these half-powers might have a shelf life, or might otherwise be limited somehow -- that he might run out of 'energy' at some point and... well, that would be that. The way Clark had talked about the state of things, it had sounded like these powers had had to be taken back, not just 'gone away' after a bout of wild overusage ...but Eric had never held onto his 'power-up' from Clark for any appreciable length of time. And, for all Lex knew, there might be more issues than even the usual unfortunate meteor-rock-related side-effects that might come with their use...

But he had shared those thoughts with Clark during their patrols last night, and it didn't bear repeating. What Lex _hadn't_ said -- and would not -- was that he wanted to run some -- careful -- tests on himself at some point -- _soon_ \-- to see what he was up against, really. In the meantime, he wanted to save the majority of Clark's powers 'for a rainy day' when he might really need them and they'd do him the most good, so-to-speak. It would be worse than bad to suddenly lose them in the middle of a fight, as it were. He didn't bother to explore the thought that the powers might last; one way or the other, the League would make him "return" them eventually, if they didn't 'run out', and if the power transfer _did_ involve a slow natural decline... well, he'd have to give them back to Clark as a matter of course -- otherwise, Clark might lose that half for good.

"But that's just it, Lex," Clark said. "When Eric got my powers the first time, he was selfish, did everything he'd ever wanted to do with them, and then got suicidal after his parents got scared of him. The second time, he just wanted the power back, and this third time..."

And that should have been that, but when Clark paused, it didn't sound like he was done talking. Lex turned his head upwards to frown up at Clark, but Clark was staring off at the ceiling as he explained, talking slowly, like he was feeling out the right words for what he was trying to say.

"When Lana got half my powers, she... well, _you_ know what happened. She did what she wanted, when she wanted, and eventually worked her way up to trying to kill you. And when she got the Prometheus suit, Tess was scared of her. _Tess_ ," he reiterated, because Tess wasn't afraid of anyone unless they actively had a knife at her throat wanting to kill her and she was certain that she had no leverage to stop them, and apparently Clark must have learned that at some point.

 _Oh..._ thought Lex. He'd always wondered about that. _So this wasn't the first time you've gone half-and-half, even if someone else ended up with the second half for a bit, first._ Well, that was good to know.

Clark sat up and drew away from Lex slightly, and Lex let him, watched Clark lean forward and resettle himself with his elbows on his knees, that familiar old posture, gaining more mental distance than physical. He watched Clark grimace and frown and rub his fingers across his forehead to try and dispel them both.

"Lois got all my powers for a day once," Clark continued with an echo of a wince and a sigh, and Lex could just feel his eyebrows go up -- _that must have been a disaster_ \-- "and she used them to make her job easier. She didn't really think about trying to use them to fight crime the way the Blur did, but she did manage to sort of do that because the story she was working on involved Winslow Scott, and some other notable villains who all had designs on Metropolis, though things almost got a little out of hand at the end." Clark stopped for a bit, then said. "She enjoyed having them and using them to their utmost, pretty much in secret, even though I tried to warn her about them. Lana was the same way, but... _darker_ in what she wanted. I don't know if it was different for Lana and Eric because there was meteor rock used in their transfer and not Lois', or if it was just... _them_ , but... well, they were all pretty much accidents."

Clark swallowed hard. "And then there was my dad."

Lex stared up at him, getting a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. _Did I just hear that right?_

"He... went and **argued** for them. From the A.I., when it was still in the caves. He wanted them and wouldn't take no for an answer."

_What?_

"It was the summer that you were stuck on that island. I... I went a little crazy and ran away to Metropolis, but..." Clark closed his eyes and grimaced. "I know you knew about that at least a little bit, after, but what was really wrong was... I was on red Kryptonite. On purpose. And I didn't want to go back home."

Lex tensed and almost blurted out _Why?_ , but managed to hold his tongue and bodily forced himself to relax. The way Clark was acting, if he stopped now, he might never start again.

"I... don't want to talk about how he did it," Clark said. "I'm not completely sure myself. He wouldn't tell me afterwards; never really did. But... I had all my powers at the time, and then he had his own, too. ...And then he came and found me in Metropolis, and we fought, and then he made me come home."

"You really didn't want to go home?" Lex echoed, stunned, his mind reeling as he tried to process all this new and unlikely information. He'd never have guessed...

"I was scared to, when I was off the Red," Clark admitted quietly. "Some days, I'm still not sure if I should've gone back."

"Clark..."

"I did something really horrible, Lex," Clark said quietly, to Lex's growing horror, in a tone that was far too familiar to him but for how it was coming out of someone _else's_ mouth, and Clark was not looking at him, was not looking at anything, just staring off at something Lex couldn't see, stuck inside his own head, and wringing his hands over and over again like he was trying to keep himself from grasping at something he could never, _ever_ reach. That was broken. That he could never fix. No matter what he did.

"I did something unforgiveable, and they forgave me anyway."

He stopped, and started, and stopped again. And, finally let out in one shuddering breath...

"And I'm still not sure why."

Clark swallowed hard, then seemed to reflexively pull away from something, and rubbed a hand over his face again as he whispered:

"...But at first? They didn't."

Lex stared at Clark and thought of Julian and his mother, and being too late. Of Duncan, and Amanda, and the poison of silence. Of the Julian clone, and innocence lost. Of Lionel, and Tess, and utter soul-deep betrayal. Oh yes, he _recognized_ the tone, and the feelings underpinning it.

_\-- I didn't mean to. I didn't want to. **Please forgive me!** If you ever loved me at all... **Please believe me!** \--_

_\-- I never wanted... --_

_\-- If I could do it all again... --_

That well-known, well-worn plea, in a silent voice.

...in Clark's voice. Not his.

...Not _only_ his.

Lex shivered.

He watched as Clark bit his lip and dropped his head. "Dad, he... mom was in the hospital, and he... he wouldn't let me..." Clark said haltingly, quietly. "It was my... fault and... he told me... that..."

Lex had never hated Jonathan Kent more than he did in that moment, watching Clark.

Clark swallowed hard, scrubbed his hands over his face. He looked so tired in that moment -- years, _decades_ older -- but then he shook himself -- seemed almost himself again... _almost_ \-- and continued. "But Dad didn't get my powers, Lex," he grated out with a small shudder, like each word was costing him something to speak. "They weren't from me, and they didn't involve meteor rock, but he ended up using them and stressing his body to his limits fighting me. I wasn't holding back when he came after me. I didn't want to go back home, and I wasn't about to let him make me. We took down at least one building around us."

Lex didn't know why Clark was telling him this. Part of him -- a very large part of him -- was screaming at him to make Clark stop.

"He ended up really hurt because of it."

"His heart," Lex murmured with a growing dread, and he was realizing now why Clark had hit back so hard when Lex had mockingly blamed him for his own father's death, after he'd... to Lionel... when he couldn't take...

Clark nodded dourly. "Yeah."

Lex didn't know what to say.

Clark seemed to. He stirred and came more and more back to himself with every word. "Lex, the first thing you said -- probably the first thing you thought -- when the idea of using my powers came up, was caution. You thought about how Eric barely had them for a week, and worried about whether they'd even last, or if it was like some one-time super-charge that might peter out if used too often. You thought about how you weren't supposed to have powers, and worried about meteor rock psychosis and whether your system could handle it if you used them too much." Clark shook his head, then turned and looked back at Lex. "I didn't even have to say anything. It took you all of two seconds to think of the worst problems on your own, didn't it? And you did it right away."

Lex almost winced at the comparison. He hated being put up against Jonathan, even if he came out ahead. (Not that out-thinking Jonathan Kent was something Lex considered a difficulty. Even so.) But when it came right down to it, Jonathan hadn't thought it through, and Lex could and was. _Easily._ It made Lex squirm a little, though, to think that Jonathan had been so stupid and desperate to ignore the long-term cost -- to both Clark, and himself... oh, yes, and _his wife_ \-- for such a short-term gain, yet still cared about Clark to the extent that he'd risked all of _himself_ in order to get Clark back... It had been an unnecessary risk, yes, especially to go about doing it _that way_ \-- Lex could think of so many other ways to have captured or contained Clark in such a situation -- but, still...

The really sticky part was, Clark wasn't wrong, and Lex didn't know if he was right.

"I don't think Lois was messed up by them; Emil checked her over pretty thoroughly afterwards," Clark told him. "But what happened with Lois was different. Lana and Eric were the closest to the same thing happening as what happened to you, and I don't know if they really were okay afterwards or not. Lana wouldn't really tell me other than saying that I shouldn't worry about it, and I have no idea about Eric at all."

Lex wasn't entirely sure about that himself. They hadn't exactly had any 'before' to compare to Eric's 'after', until maybe now -- assuming that his people had kept his medical records up to date. But Eric had never had Clark's powers longer than a few days, or used them all that much.

"You weren't trying to end up with my powers, Lex; I know that," Clark told him. "If you had been, you would have wanted them for some specific reason, because you thought you needed them, and I probably wouldn't've been able to talk you out of it." He sighed, and got a small smile. "But that wasn't what happened. It was a surprise. And you hate surprises."

Lex made a noncommital sound, though it wasn't like Clark wasn't speaking the truth.

"Surprises make you wary. I know you don't like them, and you sort of poke at them cautiously. You kind of prowl around them and check over all the angles," Clark said. "And the powers were a surprise. You didn't want to just run right out and use them. I know you, Lex -- when I saw you out on the roof, you were trying to figure out what they'd even be good for," Clark said with a tired, almost sad smile. "You're the only person I know who's like that. I mean, the meteor rocks practically prove that anybody who's given that kind of power all-at-once can't handle it."

"Yet you think I can?" Lex said incredulously, feeling pretty much every ounce of dark in his soul in that moment.

"Lex, you were practically born to power," Clark said, sounding almost amused. "There were so many things you could have done to people, so many times." He shook his head. "I don't think you've ever blacklisted anyone once, and you even fixed things for Perry White when you found out what Lionel had done. --I know you bought the Daily Planet to piss Lois off because she was working there at the time," Clark said, "but you didn't fire her, and you didn't really jerk her around or cut her salary or anything. You weren't trying to drive the newspaper into the ground around her ears just for the hell of it."

"That would have been a horrible thing to do with a decent investment," Lex muttered.

" _I know_ ," Clark said. "That's my point."

Lex felt uneasy, more than that even. "Clark, I'm no saint--"

"I know that!" Clark said, sounding exasperated, abruptly shifting to turn towards him a little more and face him. "You've done a lot of horrible things that you never should have done, or even considered doing, ever."

Lex clenched his jaw.

"But I'm not a complete idiot. I figured out after the fact that you really thought the world was going to end if you didn't do something _really_ drastic, **right away** ," Clark said. "And I don't think you would have done half of what you did if you hadn't thought that we were all about to get killed by an inbound unstoppable alien armada or something."

"Clark--"

"--You look after your employees," Clark cut him off. "You look after the people you feel like you have responsibility for, like... like all those Greek and Roman guys in history you've always ever talked about. Caesar and Alexander and all of them. That's never changed," Clark told him, eyes dark with intent, "not even when you couldn't remember anything. That's you."

 _Born to power, wield it by right, divine providence over one's subjects, for the betterment of all mankind..._ It was a lofty ideal in theory, but it left out the trail of dead and broken bodies that those blood-soaked conquerors had all left behind them while attempting to carve out some tentative peace for their people -- the practical price that had had to be paid for a safe haven in which to live.

Lex didn't really think that Clark actually **understood** that part of it. Partly because it had never come up -- Lex had never saw fit to mention it.

"Lots and lots of power, and money, and influence, and all sorts of stuff, and you've never tried to hurt people on purpose with it, not just for the sole purpose of watching people in pain and enjoying their suffering, not that I've ever heard of," Clark said, and that left Lex mentally staggering about in a fit. "Yeah, I know you've fought with the League sometimes, but they attacked you first, and they've tried to kill you first. You've been reactive to practically everything, at least in the beginning. You've never gone out _looking_ for fights. Not really. ...Well, not before last night's patrol, anyway, and that's kind of different."

 _Right. Because Clark actually **believes** that the League totally deserves it? That they have it coming to them?_ Then what had been up with Clark rescuing Bart from that holding cage after Impulse had leveled so many other LuthorCorp facilities? ...And it wasn't like Lex hadn't gotten some serious satisfaction from watching Bart zap himself crazy whenever he'd stopped running in circles for any appreciable length of time.

Did giving Bart an 'out' of not necessarily being zapped if he had kept on running-until-he-dropped somehow qualify Lex for 'not-all-that-bad' sainthood? ...As opposed to, what, strapping Bart down to a table and torturing him outright just for the hell of it? What kind of twisted mindset did Clark have going on upstairs?

"So... just to be clear," Lex said in a strangled tone. "You're all right with me having your powers because you think I could be _worse?_ "

"What? Ugh -- _no!_ " Clark said, sitting up and running his hands through his hair. "God, okay -- if you really wanna be that pessimistic about it, I guess you could say that you're the _least_ -worst person I can think of to have half my powers if I had to pick somebody," Clark said. "I sure wouldn't give them to _Oliver_ ," Clark said, the way most people spat. "I'm not even sure I'd be comfortable sharing them with Lois -- I mean, not that she really wants them, either," Clark amended. "Not after last time."

 _He did not just actually imply that he's **comfortable** sharing his powers with me,_ Lex thought weakly. _He did not just do that._

"Look, if you had gotten all 'I am your nemesis and now I am going to take over the world and' ... and, uh, 'lay waste to all you hold most dear' or something on the roof last night, and all evil 'and there's nothing you can do about it!', then yeah, I would've freaked out. But you didn't want to do that," Clark said, eyeing him.

"I thought you thought the League would have mindwiped me again if I went 'villain'," Lex put out there, frowning over at him. "Or 'worse'."

"Well, yeah, but I still would've tried to stop them."

That pulled the mental floor right out from under him.

"...Even if I was pure evil," Lex said slowly.

"Okay -- one? You're not pure evil," Clark told him, crossing his arms. "And two? Yes. Nobody deserves that. It's wrong."

Ugh. Clark and his completely impractical morals.

"And Lois backs me up on that one."

...Riiight.

"Well, maybe not the pure evil thing."

...Because that made him feel so much better.

"You know what I mean."

Lex rubbed at his forehead, and the migraine he was starting to develop. "No, Clark, I really don't think I do."

"Lex," Clark said patiently. "The very worst thing you could think of to do with my powers was to become a Hero and thumb your nose at the League." Clark paused. "And, uh, help me do it too." Clark eyed him. "You really don't think that says something?"

...Lex had a feeling that explaining his whole bring-down-the-League-in-flames-by-making-them-their-own-worst-enemy plan would probably not go over well with Clark at this particular juncture.

"And I don't get why you always had this whole 'I'm evil and need saving' thing, anyway," Clark said grumpily.

"...Because I am and I do?" Lex said slowly through gritted teeth.

"Yeah, no, you're not, and why would you even think that, anyway?"

"Because... Lionel..."

"Ugh," Clark said, scrubbing his hands over his face. "You're **not** Lionel, you're not even _like_ Lionel. You're only kind-of-sort-of-like Lionel _sometimes_ ," Clark said, looking up at him, suddenly angry as hell, "and I really wish you wouldn't do that!"

"Clark--"

"No!" Clark said, suddenly irate and throwing up his hands. "You don't get to do that! You don't get to just give up! You don't get to just say, 'oh, it's inevitable' or 'oh, I'm a Luthor, so' whatever! No! You screw up sometimes, and you try and fix it when you do, and then you get up and move on and learn from it and try and do better the next time. This isn't some great big secret; anybody can be a good person! You just do it! Everybody does it!"

Lex's mouth dropped open.

"The only thing that's difficult about this is getting up and not giving in. You keep going, even when you don't want to. Especially when it hurts." Clark looked Lex straight in the eye. "And you're the most stubborn person I've ever met. The only reason you wouldn't be able to do this, is if you didn't want to."

Lex was shocked to the core.

"Lionel--"

" _No_ ," Clark said coldly, crossing his arms. "You don't get to blame it on him anymore. I know now that I can't really understand how awful he was and what that was like, having to grow up with him and deal with him all the time and everything; I probably never really will. But he's dead, and gone, and he can't stab you in the back or undermine you anymore. So, no. Just, no."

Lex felt frustrated _as hell_ just then. It was like kicking sand -- no traction, no...

"So, _what_ \--" Lex spat out caustically, standing up and pacing, because he couldn't sit still for this. "I'm just suddenly 'magically' _forgiven_ all my sins? Just like that?!" he said, snapping his fingers. "Slate wiped clean, and everything's golden so long as I _behave?!?_ "

"Don't be stupid, Lex," Clark said, glaring from the couch. "I don't forgive you."

Lex came to a screeching halt, standing still, barely breathing. Poleaxed. He faintly realized that this must have been what Tess had felt confronting him up in his Tower office, right after he'd walked up to her and...

"And you've barely _begun_ to try and clean up everything that went wrong with LuthorCorp," Clark continued. "And you're, what, on your fourth, fifth chance now?" he said. "Fine. Whatever. --No, you don't get a clean slate," Clark said. "But me yelling at you about things that you can't change that you're already trying to fix won't help anything! So, no," Clark said, standing. "You don't get to be blamed for them anymore; not by me. You died, or close to it. You even lost your memory for awhile. But yeah, it's still your _responsibility_ , and you're doing that, already taking that on, so..." he shrugged.

Lex struggled with that for a moment, trying to handle it.

And failing.

"And I suppose you want the same courtesy extended to you for all of your own lies?" Lex all-but-sneered back.

"Because, what, I should feel guilty you did all that stuff because you didn't know I was Kal-El?" Clark said incredulously. "That's not on me."

Lex couldn't believe his ears. Clark, the king of guilt, wasn't taking up something that was actually _his--_

"That's on you," Clark said, as if it needed to be made any clearer what he thought about it. "I didn't make you do any of that--"

\--which just pissed Lex off all the more. "If I'd known--!"

"You knew it was me and still used the Orb on me," Clark said flatly, standing up and pacing forward.

"You should have told me--"

"When, Lex? When exactly should I have told you? When was a good time?" Clark practically snarled at him sarcastically.

" _I had a right to know!_ " Lex screamed at him.

" _No, you didn't!_ " Clark shouted back.

" _ **I was worthy of your trust!**_ "

" _ **YOU TOLD LANA THAT I WAS THE SCARECROW!**_ " Clark screamed back.

Dead silence.

" _You_ told _Lana_ I was the Scarecrow," Clark said dangerously, hands fisted at his side as he stared down at Lex. "I _explicitly_ asked you not to tell anyone, and you said you wouldn't, and then you turned right around and **did it anyway**."

Lex was having trouble breathing.

"And _then_ you told me all about how you felt about secrets and lies and what happened after someone betrayed _you_ , how you'd never trust them again, and I knew right then that I was already gone. Done. That was it. That maybe I could forgive you for telling Lana, because you hadn't meant to hurt me and you were only trying to help and I knew that, but that you'd never do the same for me."

Lex swallowed hard.

"And the way you were looking at things, I was lying every time I stood right there in front of you, doing nothing but breathing."

Lex slowly clenched his teeth.

"So what was I supposed to do, Lex? Huh? _That_ was bad enough, but there was Lionel, too, and he was _always_ around, always getting into every last thing you ever did and knew, and there you were, doing stuff like investigating me, even after you'd said you would stop!" Clark said, throwing up his hands again, and Lex felt like ice was in his veins. "I may not have really understood anything at all, especially not back then, but I did know that he was dangerous. And what do you think he would have done if I'd told you, and he knew that you knew about me?" Clark asked. "Because I don't know, and I'm not sure I ever want to."

Actually, Lex had a pretty damn good idea of what Lionel would have done, though he wasn't about to share it. He felt torn between two thoughts: the thought that Clark was actually aware that Lionel had been practically Satan-incarnate, and what that might entail in terms of Clark being understanding about Lex's situation and difficulties given what else he'd said earlier; and the idea of Clark thinking that Lex couldn't protect him from Lionel -- though, truthfully, he'd had trouble doing that for Chloe, early-on...

No, damnit -- he needed to stop second-guessing himself!

"The only time I could have talked to you about it was after Lionel died. Which only happened after you killed him," Clark continued, staring him down. "And those last six months or so before the Fortress... We weren't getting along," Clark said bluntly. "We weren't even talking to each other. You were off doing Veritas stuff, after artifacts, after the Kryptonian Orb, and I... I had my own problems."

_\--What?!?! What **problems?!** You had Lana, you had your idyllic little farm life--!_

"I... I don't know how much you knew about the BrainIAC thing that was trying to release Zod back then," Clark said, "but I knew next to nothing about the thing at the time... still don't know much, really. But what I did know -- what I found out the hard way, after everything with Dark Thursday -- was that it was faster than me, stronger than me, smarter than me, knew more about Krypton than I did, and _didn't_ have my vulnerability against green Kryptonite," Clark said. "And it _kept coming back_. Back then, I'd thought it'd been destroyed once, but then it came back, worse than ever, and I just... I couldn't do anything."

Lex started, shocked out of his anger. It had never occurred to him that the Black Ship construct -- that 'Milton Fine' -- had had power _beyond_ Superman-level abilities. ...But, it retrospect, it made a sickening kind of sense: humans built their best robotics to be better-than-human-capable, so why wouldn't Kryptonians have done the same for their machines, as well?

"There were days when I didn't even really think past the next day, let alone the next month. I couldn't stop BrainIAC. I didn't even know where it was, or what it was doing. Chloe was trying to figure that out, but I couldn't even help out with that," Clark said, sounding frustrated. "And then it came and hurt Lana and _there was nothing I could do_ ," Clark said, pained. "I couldn't even..." He closed his eyes and clenched his fists, then continued.

"It managed to blackmail Kara into doing something really messed up, and... it tricked her after that, though I didn't know about that until later either," Clark said. "It locked her away and took her face and..." he shook his head. "It attacked Chloe. She ended up in the hospital, too, and I just lost it." He opened his eyes, but he was staring at a point away, off to the side, not looking at Lex, not really looking at anything. "I went after it. Chloe had finally figured out that it had been needing to power itself up using the electrical grid. I managed to track it down using Chloe's idea, and... it was damaged already. I was able to destroy it." He sighed, dropped his head, and ran his hands through his hair again, suddenly looking really tired. "Not that I knew at the time that it was going to come back _again_."

"Chloe woke up, but Lana was gone, and then you were headed for the Arctic with the Orb and..." Clark grimaced. "I just didn't care anymore," he said tonelessly. "I wanted everything to be over. I thought..." He ran a hand over his face. "I just didn't want to fight anymore. I wanted it to end."

"But I swear, Lex," Clark said, looking back up at him, "I didn't know what the Orb was going to do. All I knew was that it was supposed to be able to be used to control me, not that it was going to drop the Fortress on both our heads!" He looked almost pained. "If I'd known that, I would have stopped you. I never wanted you hurt!"

Lex stood there and stared at him.

_Right. So let's recap here. The whole time that I thought Clark was snuggling up on the Kent farm with my ex-wife in pre-marital bliss, Clark was **actually** spending the year feeling depressed and scared out of his mind because the crazy-loyal nearly-unstoppable monster-robot lackey of an alien conqueror who hates him was screwing with him, playing cat-and-mouse games, when it could run in and kill him at any time. And then it started picking off his loved ones, family, and friends, one by one, right in front of him. And at that point, he couldn't take it anymore, so he went on a suicide run up against it, not knowing that it was damaged beforehand, and somehow by the grace of god managed to survive the encounter._

_He tried to commit suicide, except it didn't work._

_So then he went up north looking for me, who had been looking for Kal-El for years and wanted to control-and/or-kill him when I finally caught up with him, because I believed he was an evil alien world-conquering menace, and **Clark knew this walking into it** , and he self-admittedly didn't even really try to stop me from using an alien device on him that was meant to control him, that he didn't even know what it was going to do to him. Because he thought I would 'make everything stop.' That I would kill him, when BrainIAC hadn't managed to get the job done._

_He tried to use **me** to commit suicide._

_Twice in a handful of hours, he tried to die._

"I mean, I didn't really want you to do it," Clark said.

_Oh, sure you didn't._

"And I probably couldn't have convinced you any better."

_A monkey could've done a better job. You said it yourself: you didn't care anymore. You weren't really trying._

"But I probably should've just backed off a few steps and grabbed a crystal and threw it and knocked the stupid Orb out of your hand or something."

Lex blinked at him.

"Or, I don't know, run away after you stuck the stupid thing in the console."

Lex blinked again.

"Maybe gone off and grabbed some rope, and lassoed you from the entrance, dragged you back outside or something."

_...Huh?_

"Gotten us out of range."

Lex was still stuck on the mental image of Clark tossing a line of rope around his torso from behind and yanking him backwards like a freaking cartoon character. Ziiiip!

"Stupid Orb."

Actually, Lex hadn't ever seen Clark lasso anything before. Trying to imagine it, he kept picturing Clark in full cowboy gear...

"Stupid Fortress."

...red-and-blue cowboy gear that also tried really hard to be a Superman costume and failed at both miserably, complete with a plaid cowboy hat, except...

"Stupid AI."

"...you can't really lasso something properly without a horse," Lex said out loud, twitching slightly.

Clark stared at him. "What?"

"A horse," Lex said, sort of blankly. "You'd need..."

"Lex, we were in the middle of the Arctic Circle," Clark said with annoyed exasperation, crossing his arms. "I wouldn't drag a _horse_ up to the Arctic Circle."

Lex frowned at him.

Clark rolled his eyes. "Okay, _fine_ ," he said like he was making some great concession. " _Maybe_ a polar bear, then. Or one of those dogsled teams or something."

Lex stared at Clark.

Clark stared at Clark.

...They both suddenly realized that they were having a serious conversation about what sort of animal companionship Clark might need in a situation involving lassoing Lex in the icy tundra north.

Lex's brain, not content to rest on the laurels of such a paltry minor relevation, additionally supplied him with a new mental image of Clark sporting more-purple-blue-than-red leather-fringed cowboy duds sitting astride a polar bear.

Lex raised a hand to his mouth to attempt to stifle the wheezing, weak laughter he was producing.

Clark gave him a sickly, small smile.

"Sorry," said Lex, getting himself under control. "Not funny. I know." He spared half a thought to say, "I'm sorry you got hurt, too."

Clark shrugged noncommitally.

"It could've been worse," Clark said.

"I had found out where you were, after, but I hadn't known you'd been depowered," Lex put out there. "Not until I saw the footage of you and Oliver at the Black Creek facility." Lex had thought that the light beam hadn't actually done Clark any lasting harm; he hadn't been able to fathom why he'd stayed with the Russians performing slave labor. He'd thought at the time that Clark had either been trying to hide in one of the most remote and unlikely places on the planet, or had ended up there accidentally and hadn't felt inclined to risk showing off his powers leaving the grounds; maybe a bit of both. ...Stupid of him, in retrospect, despite the fact that he'd had difficulty thinking clearly through the blinding pain from the frostbite he'd been suffering under at the time, that even the morphine hadn't exactly taken the edge off of, much.

Clark grimaced.

"Yeah, well, that could've been worse, too," Clark said. "Being stuck there, unable to do anything... It kind of woke me up to how stupid I'd been acting, and how selfish. I'd just been hiding on the farm, not even trying. I might not have been able to do anything about BrainIAC all those months," Clark said with a grimace, "but at least I could've been doing a lot of good elsewhere, instead."

That just made Lex's head spin, because that _really_ was not a normal thought process. Most people would just be thankful to get out alive and relieved to get back to their lives, wanting to forget everything that had happened and put it all behind them, or hate their ex-captors with a dark black passion and want a bloody drawn revenge, or maybe end up so horribly traumatized from the experience that they would spend the rest of their miserable lives jumping at shadows, or something. Not _motivated to help others_ when that sort of experience did nothing but teach you that all those nebulous others out there in the world tended to be nothing more than perfectly inclined to gleefully stomp you into the mud when given the least bit of a chance, and that no-one ever deserved to be helped or shown the least bit of kindness at all.

But nope. Not Clark. _Clark_ lived through that, and somehow survived Oliver shooting him in the chest, and miraculously got his powers back after all this somehow when instead he should've been dead, and then thought, 'hey, I should beat up criminals so other people don't go through the same thing I did' and...

Hm.

...All right. Maybe there was some logic involved in that thought process after all. Lex would give him that one.

"I sort of got a little better after that, I guess," Clark said. "At least in trying a little harder to be better at the Vigilante stuff; I mean, I started helping patrol the city, at least." He grimaced. "But things went downhill pretty quickly after you ... well..." He looked up at Lex. "I don't know if Oliver actually killed you in that van or not, or if it was a clone or something instead and you were actually somewhere else, or whatever it was. And... I guess I really don't need to know, if you don't want to tell me. I'm just glad you're back now," he said, crossing his arms and straightening, with a finality and perfect assurance that took Lex's breath away.

"How do you even... know I'm me?" Lex asked.

Clark just frowned a little at him. "Because you are. I mean-- You're you." When Lex's frown slipped into confusion, he added, "I just... do, okay? I mean..." Clark shifted from side to side, like he was thinking and a little off-put. "You knew I was me when I got un-body-swapped from Lionel that one time, and you knew he wasn't me before that, right?" Clark reminded him. "You just knew, too."

Lex was about to argue that that wasn't the same thing at _all_ , but...

Lex shut his mouth.

And then Lex kept his mouth shut some more as he realized that -- if their conversations over the last twenty-four hours were any indication... -- when Lex talked less, Clark tended to talk more.

He felt he would like to encourage such behavior from Clark in the future, even if it meant taking an unofficial vow of silence to get it.

"But, yeah, things really only started to get better about two months before you came back," Clark said, rubbing the back of his neck. "And I'd thought things were bad before..." He shook his head.

Lex stood there and blinked at Clark.

He tried to conceive of a situation worse than Clark being suicidally-depressed and believing that Lex was going to kill him.

...Considering that the only scenarios he could come up with involved Clark cackling like a madman and trying to take over the planet -- and other totally unrealistic behavior in a similar vein, to say the least -- he felt he failed miserably.

"Just to be clear," Lex said slowly. "You think the two-and-a-half years following Oliver's... tantrum were worse than the year or so preceding it?"

"Yes," Clark said simply.

Lex mused over that for a bit.

"...I see," Lex said levelly.

\--because _clearly_ he was going to need to spend some quality time doing some more in-depth research to fill in the missing gaps of his timeline. Given Clark's window of perspective just then regarding what Lex had _thought_ had been a relatively 'calm' period in their respective, hm, 'lives', there must have been events and ongoing circumstances under the surface to which he was not privy... yet. During that time when Lex had not been around and able to experience (or otherwise interfere) those unfolding events first-hand, himself -- what had _also_ seemed to be a 'calm' period (...compared to what their lives had become, anyway) had evidently been _anything but_. After all, somehow Lex doubted that a single monster running amuck on-and-off in the city, the nationwide VRA upheaval, and the odd near-planetfall could singly or lumped together account for _that much_ 'worse'. They'd had worse _days_ in Smallville, early-on.

...No, wait, scratch that, the near-planetfall counted as part of those last two months -- which meant that _that_ event somehow inexplicably counted as 'better'... than _what_ , exactly?!

_What **the hell** was going on while I was out of commission?_

Damn Tess and her lack of essential record-keeping, for LuthorCorp _and everything else_. If only he'd been around and about to experience it -- or otherwise interfere -- first-hand, himself...

Clark tilted his head slightly and gave him a piercing look.

Lex wondered what he deserved that for.

Clark sighed and looked away.

"I'm totally screwing this up, aren't I?" Clark said with a pained smile and a pained voice.

"Hm? What do you mean?" Lex said neutrally, sliding his hands into his pockets, trying to ignore the mental and emotional whiplash he was rapidly accruing from this extended -- and extensive -- conversation.

"Well, I've got the 'staying here' part down, I guess," Clark said, dropping his hands to his sides, "But I'm pretty much failing the 'not talking' part, aren't I," he ended weakly on a wince and a slightly helpless shrug.

Lex stared at him for a moment.

_Oh, Clark..._

Lex slid his hands out of his pockets and stepped forward.

He sighed and reached up, cupped Clark's face in his slightly-shaking hands. _He's not suicidal anymore, so this will be okay. I will find a way to make it okay._ "Clark, I did ask the question. You just... answered it. Kansas manners." _And we both know I'd have been far more angry if you hadn't answered._

Clark looked at him, into his eyes.

Clark sighed and let his eyelids slowly slide shut at about the same time Lex's did, too.

Lex couldn't help it when a sad smile slid across his face and away again, as they leaned into each other ever so slightly, touching forehead-to-forehead.

They stood there like that for awhile.

"Sorry," Clark said quietly. "Didn't really mean to cause a fight."

Lex huffed out a small laugh. "That was hardly a fight." _We've had worse._

"Felt like one to me," Clark murmured.

Lex thought for a moment. Yes, they'd had worse, but... "Would you rather just sit and rest with me awhile?" Lex asked lowly.

"Yes, please," Clark said just as quietly in turn.

He and Lex slowly leaned away from each other, and Lex couldn't help but feel as though this had been more intimate somehow than any hug he'd ever received from him, and they'd hardly been touching each other at all.

Clark moved away slightly, turning and moving to the side, then pausing, to wait to move forward at Lex's shoulder rather than lead or trail him. No, when he followed it was at Lex's pace.

...And, because Lex just had to push his luck, Lex opened his mouth and said:

"I don't forgive you for all the lies, you know."

"I know," Clark responded, not tensing, just sighing out the words as he sank down onto the couch next to Lex. "I'm hoping we can still get along, though, even if you can't trust me."

Lex frowned slightly to himself, safely inside his own mind. Clark had had the right of it earlier, and Lex loathed the thought of being so hypocritical, even with his self-admittedly (though perfectly reasonable) gargantuan trust issues to try and work through. Besides, if anyone was an exception to the rule, it was Clark. He wasn't above giving Clark a second chance, especially not when Lex was on a third or fourth of his own. He'd come to the conclusion that Clark would always have secrets years ago, after 'winning' Lana that first time and wedding her. He had made peace with that fact shortly thereafter.

So long as Clark didn't lie to him anymore...

But could he trust Clark not to do that? His loyalties lay with the League.

...didn't they?

He shifted uneasily in place.

"...Lex?"

"I thought you said you wanted to be friends," Lex said. It had taken him awhile to unravel the various layers of sarcasm enshrouding those words from when Clark had made his complaint on the subject during their quasi-accidental rendezvous on the roof last night, but he'd finally realized that Clark would rather be friends than not -- and that he felt the alternative disastrous.

"I thought you thought that was a bad idea," Clark said, craning his head to look down at him curiously.

"And I still do," Lex said simply. "But I can't see how you could think that it would be workable or acceptable for us to be friends without being able to trust each other," Lex pointed out, feeling rather odd.

"Lex," Clark sighed out, in a tone that almost remade it into a complaint, "I don't really trust anyone, and I've been friends with people before."

_??_

"What about Chloe?" Lex said.

"What _about_ her?" Clark said easily.

"You trust her," Lex put out there, with an undertone of _I'm calling this bullshit_.

"No, I don't." Lex leaned back away from him, and, at Lex's incredulous look, he sighed again, deeply. "...Lex. --Okay, look," he said, making a pained face and rubbing at his forehead. "If you need an example or something...?"

Lex gave him a look that served as a nod.

"Okay. Well, there was this one time," Clark began. "Me and Lois got stuck in this... electronic simulated world-thing," Clark explained. "We thought it was real, I thought I had no powers; it was that sort of thing," he said. "Happened around the time of the worst VRA bill stuff," he added. "A bunch of government-types had grabbed some of us. They were trying to figure out ways to shut off our powers, turn them back on when they wanted, that kind of thing," he said offhandedly, and the very idea gave Lex the chills.

"Chloe managed to find us and hack in. She said that where we were wasn't real, that we had to wake up, that there was only one point of exit." He gave Lex an exasperated look. "It reqiured jumping off the roof of the Daily Planet building into thin air."

"A leap of faith," Lex murmured at the irony of it.

"Yeah," Clark agreed, nodding. "That was pretty much it." He caught Lex's gaze. "Because Chloe said that if I didn't completely believe in her -- that she was telling the truth in what she was telling me, that what I thought was reality wasn't really real -- that I wouldn't be able to get through. And that I would die in real life if I died in the simulation, from the mental shock."

 _Well, I think I know how this turns out..._ Lex thought, though why Clark had thought it was a counter-example was beyond him.

But Clark was shaking his head. "No, Lex. You don't get it. She had done a bunch of stuff at the time that made it pretty likely that she was lying, had her own agenda, and wasn't on our side or trying to help any of us," Clark explained. "I had every reason _not_ to trust her."

And Clark took a deep breath and said, "And I didn't."

Lex stared at him.

Clark gave him a rueful smile. "I saw a couple things towards the end there that made it pretty clear that 'reality' was probably pretty 'virtual'," he explained. "I let Chloe think that I had trusted her, after we were out, said some things that were true, but let her draw the wrong conclusions," he explained. "But at the time... I did something a lot scarier than put my blind trust in Chloe, Lex," he said.

"What did you do?" Lex asked, perfectly willing to play the captive audience.

"I listened to Lois." Clark looked Lex in the eye and said, without fanfare, "I closed my eyes and I trusted _myself_."

And then Clark leaned back into the couch and said, "And then I flew."

Lex's eyebrows went up.

Clark got an odd sort of smile. "Yeah. It was actually weirder than that. I still couldn't fly at the time, not for real," he explained. "I guess that it worked because the VRA guys couldn't lock down in my head what I didn't know how to control, maybe," he said with a shrug. "Whatever the reason, I 'flew' myself and Lois back up and over, and through the 'exit' out."

There was a quiet, thoughtful silence for awhile.

Lex wondered if the scary part for Clark had been trusting _Lois_ \-- who one would logically assume was part of Clark's 'untrusted anyone' -- or if it had been trusting _himself_ \-- which, quite frankly, scared _Lex_ , because the ramifications of _that_ were... not good.

"What did you tell Chloe, after?" Lex finally asked.

"Not much," Clark said with a shrug. "Just that I didn't understand how she'd trusted me when she knew I was lying to her, and that what she'd done -- not asking me to explain, even knowing I was lying -- was really hard."

Lex was very careful not to react to that at all.

Clark, alternately, sighed again, closed his eyes, and leaned into Lex, relaxing.

 _I wonder if he truly understands what he just implied,_ Lex wondered, as his thoughts started wandering down dark paths. _Does he not trust himself...?_ But that seemed ridiculous.

Lex closed his eyes and leaned back into Clark, stifling a mental wince. This was far too much information at once. He couldn't process this effectively for an appropriate response--

Lex opened his eyes and blinked once.

_Wait._

...too much information.

_Oh, hell._

Clark was _sharing_ things. He... didn't _do_ that.

With Lex.

...Well, not with deep, dark secrets, anyway. Just with... normal stuff.

Except he was. Sharing things. Now.

\--But it wasn't _all_ deep, dark secrets, though. Some of it had been open knowledge, right? And "normal" was kind of relative anyway...

...

...

_... **Whose** side is he on, again?_

Lex closed his eyes again and furrowed his brow in a frown before realizing what he was doing and consciously smoothing it away. If Clark was sharing things...

\--but why would he be doing that, anyway? Just because they finally had a chance to be in the same room and actually _talk_ about things for the first time since Lex _knew_ the "BIG BAD ALIEN SECRET"? ...and actually remembered it because Clark wouldn't let anyone make him forget?

Just because they happened to be sharing the same powerset? ...because Clark had practically _insisted_ Lex keep them?

Just because they were fighting together on the same side? ...for one lousy night and only a single patrol under their belts to-date?

Lex considered all of this for awhile, as he quietly shared a couch with Clark and relaxed up against his shoulders and listened to him breathe.

He felt Clark, completely relaxed next to him, practically radiating a muted contentment, with all and sundry in the world and his life in general, and, given the state Lex was currently in, could come to only one conclusion.

_Oh, you **utter** bastard._

Because Lex _knew_ what Clark was trying to do.

And in the knowing, _still_ couldn't--

Honestly, he didn't know what was worse -- that Clark might be doing this on purpose, or... _not_. --Because if this really was some so-called _natural result_...

_Damnit._

Lex stirred slightly, an unwelcome disquiet flooding him like an itch. He needed to get up and move, do something, _anything_.

He looked up at Clark, who looked down at him.

"I have things to do," Lex told him, long before he even contemplated starting to pull away.

And for this bald-faced yet perfectly innocuous statement, Lex received the absolute _worst_ puppy-dog eyes known to man, shortly thereafter followed by the query: "Can I help?"

Lex looked up at a completely guileless Clark, his once-upon-a-time hero who had now made it perfectly clear that he was refusing to save Lex from himself, and Lex found himself biting his tongue to stop the natural, immediate sharp retort.

 _Right. I have to save myself,_ Lex thought dourly.

_Clark wants to 'help'._

Two completely separate things.

...Right?

\-- **Puppy-dog** eyes. Just... --why?!?

...

...

...

 _Oh, screw this,_ Lex thought.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Clark munched down on a slice of pizza as he watched over Lex's shoulder, paying close attention, then finished off the slice quickly, rubbed down his hands on a paper towel, and slid onto the newly-vacated chair that Lex had been sitting on moments ago.

"This one?" Clark asked, being almost deceptively gentle in how he poked at and teased out the end of the wire with his fingers. He still didn't have really great tactile perception, even with the drop in powers and strength.

"Yes," Lex said. "Now, you'll want to--"

Clark fastidiously maneuvered the wire end protruding out from the electronics, removed from a disassembled shoulder joint in one of the power-suits, and into the little gator-clip arms sitting on the workbench. Soon enough, it had joined its neighbors to be connected with the other few leads and lines to the new circuit that Lex was teaching him how to build. He made sure he had everything together, just so, before letting go, while listening to Lex's explanations on the physics of electricity and current -- and everything else he'd missed in quitting college too early on a degree that didn't include the hard sciences -- as he went. Then, carefully picked up the soldering iron and solder, he touched hot metal to lead and wire and made a new connection, to Lex's soft but truly-meant patter of encouragement.

Clark didn't get to create things often. Words on a page came from typing on a computer, and that was mostly a struggle and a fight to rearrange and wrestle ideas into a form that other people would understand and be willing to read. This was _building_ something, with his hands, out of pieces of things that went together because somebody decided they should, and somehow it all just _worked_.

It reminded him a little of woodwork, only with less physicality to the effort, and a requirement for slow, careful movement that not all repairwork for the baser materials did. Clark could get away with a lot, but heat and cooling couldn't happen too fast or there were problems. (He'd rather do it the 'right' way, without trying to invoke 'heat vision', or microwave-laser-eyebeams, or whatever it should be called, anyway. Ice-breath was too hard to direct and control over such small areas, besides.)

Clark smiled as he finished the first connection, and as Lex pulled out a box with wires and long metal leads, with a look of mild concentration as he touched the ends to different placed, Clark's smile morphed into a grin -- because, accordingly to Lex, the little box-like tester beeped when it should, and didn't when it shouldn't.

Lex smiled, and clapped a hand on Clark's shoulder, and as Clark began to work on the next wire, Lex began to explain what he had been doing -- _yesterday_ , not just before Clark had sat down -- and what they were really trying to get done by the end of things, and the process for doing so.

 _Here is what I can do,_ Lex always said, in pretty much everything he did. But for _Clark_ , he **kept** on talking, kept sharing **more**. More of himself, more of... well, _everything_. He always had.

For Clark, he said, _And this is how you can do it, too._

Clark stifled a smile as Lex started to really hit his stride and began to explain everything in greater and greater detail -- not just _what_ should be done, but _how_ , and _why_ , and how to _figure out_ the why...

And Clark listened.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex was happy enough for the moment. He could lose himself in the hard sciences, and while he admittedly didn't know as much about electronics work as ancient Greek and Roman history or the biological sciences, he at least knew enough to enact most of the changes and repairs that the experimental suits still required -- and would be learning more, quickly, in short order to be able to handle the rest -- and he certainly knew more than Clark did about it all.

He'd taken Clark's offer of help at face value and without throwing a fit of the twelfth order. Frankly, he'd been surprised at the result. He'd always thought Clark leery of the sciences, but here he was, sitting in front of a test bench, sciencing up the place just fine, with nary a recrimination or accusation or medieval-style rant about "testing" things being the root of all evil in sight, or any other such nonsense.

...Then again, electronics work was the grumbling uncle of all computer technology. Maybe Clark just didn't know any better and would feel 'tricked into it' later.

Ah, well. For now, Lex could get away with sliding talks of the natural sciences deftly under-the-radar, and he was perfectly happy with this state of affairs. Ignorance was bliss. ...Well, for certain _sorts_ of non-standard 'ignorance', anyway. No-one had ever claimed Clark was normal within earshot of Lex, not even his own parents.

After he'd covered what he'd wanted to cover -- _to start with_ , anyway -- and he was fairly sure that Clark didn't need constant supervision, just a critical eye and some sprinkling of reassurance, with a piece of advice now and again -- Lex pulled up a chair next to Clark to work on another section of the reconfiguration of the wiring, and he and Clark got to bantering a bit back and forth.

Lex was going to have to deem soda a banned item from the bench in the future, though, after nearly spraying it in a fine mist across the work surface, no matter how well it went with the pizza Clark had run off to grab for them once they'd finally gotten their combined lazy asses up off of the couch.

"What do you mean, they think I'm Tess?!" Lex demanded to know.

"I mean, they think you're Tess," Clark repeated patiently, paying more attention to the wiring in front of him than Lex's aghast look.

"Well, who do they think _you_ are?" Lex wanted to know.

"Emil."

Lex stared at him, then opened his mouth to explain in no uncertain terms _exactly_ how ridiculous that was, because Tess had _died_ , they had gone to her funeral-without-a-casket and _everything_ \--

\--and then paused to stop and think for a moment.

Because Tess _wasn't actually dead_ , so they weren't _that_ far off, actually, after all.

...Not that Lex couldn't change that whenever he wanted to. She was only alive by the grace of God, Lex's mercy, and through the modern-day wonder that was medical science -- which could be _dis_ -applied to her person at any time of Lex's choosing. Easily. _Criminally_ easily. _Lex-having-a-bad-day-and-wanting-a-convenient-scapegoat_ easily.

And Lex knew he wasn't the only one in his family not known for their sweet temperment ...but rather one which went well with their bright red hair.

(Well, he had still had red hair when he was nine. That counted. Probably.)

(Stupid meteor shower.)

(Except that particular meteor shower had also brought him Clark and-- ...damn. Was he not allowed to be mad about that anymore without being a complete hypocrite?)

(...Maybe he could get away with still being angry about the second one. _Those_ Kryptonians had _sucked_...)

_I should probably do something to make it harder for me to kill Tess on a whim. --Though not **too** hard. Just a **little** harder. Just in case._

"I wasn't actually trying to make anyone think I was Tess," Lex confessed, as he stopped trying to choke himself on his soda and wincingly set the cupful of liquid down. "They're just experimental suits." At Clark's confused look: "Generally, when one is creating experimental apparatus to test, one makes one of each _type_ that one is interested in, and it would hardly have fit--" _you._ Confusion dispelled. Wonderful.

"Okay... but the ponytail?"

"Showing some 'hair' throws people off the scent, and makes it seem like the helmets don't actually cover everything when they do." Lex summed up succinctly. He wasn't getting into Bart-tweaks tonight. That could spawn another yelling match.

"But, red?"

"'Flamebird' sounds like a redhead."

"Huh," said Clark thoughtfully.

"What _I_ want to know is why they think you're Emil," Lex added in of his own accord. Couldn't they tell from the height difference that that was markedly impossible? Or were they all just that unobservant?

"Emil isn't really a fighter. He doesn't like the idea of getting hurt," Clark explained, "mostly because he can imagine -- well, more like can figure out and _know_ \-- what it would feel like and how much damage it would cause just _thinking_ about it."

"Wouldn't that make him _less_ likely to run around the city at night with Tess?" Lex said, still not getting it.

"Yeah, it would, except, well, _Tess_ ," Clark said. "And if he _had_ to go out, he'd want as much padding and servoed- and powered- and braced-up stuff as possible."

Oh. Lex supposed that _could_ reasonably account for the height and bulk difference, assuming Hamilton wouldnt mind being wrapped up like a Christmas goose... or one of those little children with the overprotective mothers he'd sometimes seen waddling along the streets during wintertime in Smallville. Something like seven layers of coats and sweaters and long underwear and those dreaded 'snow-pants', no less than four pairs of mittins and two scarves and three hats, and boots up to their knees...

Lex shook his head to dispel the old image. _Well, at least I know my memory is working just fine, again._

"You're not actually trying to suggest that I act like Tess, and you, Emil ...are you?" Lex queried suspiciosuly.

"Uh, no," said Clark. "Tess was kind of a sociopath. ...Oh, and Emil would never go out on patrol like that," he ended.

Yes. Clark had a point there. Try as he might, Lex couldn't see Emil attempting anything 'bad-ass', even with a power-suit _or_ sudden superpowers. Being the sort of doctor and scientist that he was, the man would probably be more likely to spend _all_ of his time running tests on himself, or remote-control one of those robots of his from a distance if the absolute need arose.

...Hmm, now _there_ was a dangerous thought. If the public thought 'Nightwing' and 'Flamebird' were robots or AI's, that could actually land them in some trouble. Part of the reason why the Heroes were so effective was psychological warfare -- most of the petty criminals out there usually flinched, or subconsciously held back, in the vague hopes that not putting up as much of a fight would mean that they'd be spared a bit of pain when they were finally knocked down and rounded up. If the criminal stopped pulling their punches because they thought that there wasn't a real person under the suit, only a robot, it would make their vigilante justice lives far more dangerous, as well as difficult.

Lex would have to think over that one. There had to be a good way to mitigate that one without unmasking or showing any skin. ...Fake blood, perhaps? Actually, that would also reinforce the idea that they were 'mere mortals', rather than mostly-invulnerable superpowered gods, wouldn't it?

Hmm.

Hmmmmmmmmm...

"...Lex?"

"Yes, Clark?"

"You've got that kind of funny look, again. --Well, not _funny_ -funny. More like... um..." Clark looked like he wanted to say 'scary', but didn't dare _actually_ say so.

Lex smiled.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Well, geez. --If _that_ was Lex's reaction to the Tess-Emil thing, Clark wasn't sure if he _ever_ wanted to share the **naming** thing with him.

Somehow, Clark didn't think it would go over so well with Lex that Clark had chosen 'Nightwing' and 'Flamebird' because they were the closest English translations for the names of a pair of almost-mythical Kryptonian superheroes who kept dying and then not-dying over and over again -- just not for very long. For one thing, he didn't want to jinx it.

For another -- if anything, it would probably go over _too_ well...

~*~*~*~*~*~

The new "dynamic duo" split their nights between suit-work, self-defense training for their reduced and increased respective power-sets -- both with and without the suits -- and patrolling. --Generally one-a-night, not all in the same night, that is; not after Lex's slump at work the following morning after that first-night. They tried their best to be careful.

Unfortunately, _someone_ noticed how Clark and Lex were getting all buddy-buddy after the whole Christmas-party-power-split fiasco. _Two_ someones, in point of fact, who had apparently gotten fed up with getting nowhere with their Nightwing-Flamebird identity-unravelling-as-a-prelude-to-League-wide-unmasking research, and had decided to settle for 'second-best' -- spying on their own hubbys.

(Clark wasn't sure if it had been the pizza place -- with how they'd both been taking turns picking up their late-night food orders -- or if someone had been surveilling the entrances at the LexCorp side of things. Either way, Clark wanted to hit something, though he really should've just been glad that he'd been right in following his instincts and **not** tried to convince them that he'd been hanging around most inghts in Smallville for lack of any crimefighting to do. Halfway through the conversation he'd just _known_ that they'd have solid proof. Getting caught lying about _that_ would have been a **disaster**.)

They'd only been distracted by grilling Oliver over his -- and **Dinah's** , yikes -- _embroidery_ lessons with J'onn (of all things) for just a couple of hours. Clark had had to admit that he'd been hanging out with Lex, 'in an attempt to try and stay on his good side', because he knew that nobody would believe him if he said otherwise, or -- even worse -- that they _might_.

Lois had demanded to know what the hell they'd been doing together, with a steely glint in her eye.

So Clark had told them that he and Lex had been going bowling together.

Chloe had wanted to know where.

Clark had had to say that they'd been practicing indoors, but not at any bowling alley in the city -- because the first thing the Lane-Sullivans would have done was to check up on that and find out otherwise -- and, when pressed, he'd had to say that the reason why they didn't go out bowling in public was because Lex kind of sucked at it.

Lex had not been amused.

(Well, Clark couldn't very well have said that _he_ sucked at it, because he was actually really very good at it. Duh.)

Lex was even less amused when Clark gave in to his demand to tell him what the girls' reaction had been to that little bit of made-up data.

\--and _especially_ less so when he found out that he and Clark were now going to be teamed up against Chloe and Lois that Thursday night at one of the local rec centers for a rather well-attended, possibly-to-be- _televised_ , charity bowl-off.

Yeah, it was official. Clark sucked at lying.

...and Lex was probably going to kill him. Slowly. Messily. In ways that would give grown men nightmares and make little children smile. (--the Stepford ones. Obviously.)

Because Lex would be _damned_ if he didn't win this thing now. Luthors were not competitive -- oh, no, what competition would that be? -- Luthors _excelled_ at absolutely _everything_ and all without breaking a sweat. So. There.

Yes. Lex was going to utterly destroy the competition at this stupid, idiotic 'bowling tournament', and then murder Clark in his sleep.

...right after he forced Clark to teach him _how the hell to bowl_.

~*~*~*~*~*~

The way Clark figured it, after last night they'd be doing pretty good if they managed to make it through the first five minutes without Lex throwing a bowling ball through the back wall.

Not to mention the fact that Lex being caught-out as having superpowers on national television would be a Very Bad Thing, since the only people who had known about him having powers right now were the League, and Clark kind of wanted to keep it that way.

Not to mention that it would be pretty hard to keep selling the story to the League that he'd 'managed to convince Lex to hand over the rest of his powers and _not_ try to get back at Oliver for that potshot in the hospital' in exchange for a promise from Clark to accede to the 'terrible privilege of' (pfft) "forcibly" 'spending nightly face-time with him', until such time as 'it pleased him to no longer keep Clark in his presence' -- well, not if Lex _accidentally threw a bowling ball through a three-foot thick concrete retaining wall without even trying_. ('Oh, oops? Did I say that I took those powers back from him? Silly me. Tee hee!')

...Because, yeah, who would believe that Lex would be okay with keeping powers that would leave him vulnerable to close proximity to a _rock?_ That one had been a "no-brainer" that not-a-one of them had questioned. (Because apparently, according to everybody else -- who knew him _soooo_ well -- Lex _never_ took on vulnerabilities, he only excised them from himself. Cue eyeroll.)

The whole 'needing-to-spend-time-with-Lex' thing had been a harder sell, since they could all see the advantages of Clark wanting to keep an eye on Lex, but were leery of the idea that Lex wasn't taking complete advantage of him in return. They all had some really weird ideas about what must be going down every time Lex was getting him all alone in the same room with him ...like, say, whacking him in the face with a chunk of Kryptonite every time he felt like it, and then enacting unspeakable horrors upon his person. Or something. And then being too much of a chicken -- or a martyr, take your pick -- to ask for help or backup. (...Seriously?)

Clark was starting to worry that, pretty soon, somebody was gonna start accusing him of getting the fainting vapors and needing a good old lie-down on an eighteenth-century fainting couch, or... or _leeches_ or something. Since when was he a wilting flower, anyway?

The sticking point hadn't even been convincing them that he had all his powers back. He'd "proven" that to them by floating in front of them for a bit -- he actually _could_ float still ...for about five minutes, though he was careful not to let anybody know _that_ , duh.

Unbelievably, despite his protests that he 'totally had his powers back', he was still on probation and banned from most meetings. For 'being too nice to Lex', though officially it was for 'spending too much time with Lex and not being a good enough liar'.

But, yeah. Lex. With powers. Trying to bowl.

Even worse...

\--and what could possibly be worse, you might ask...?

Well, even at half-strength? Clark _still_ couldn't get drunk.

~*~*~*~*~*~

**Author's Note:**

> AN2: Yes, I am still blaming this on [iibnf's "iHero"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/289748). (Was there ever any doubt?) :)


End file.
